At the Blender Conference, Ton Roozendaal announced that he will step down as chairman and CEO of Blender effective January 1, 2026. He was behind the creation of the free 3D graphics software that is well-known in the gaming and film industries.
At the Blender Conference, Ton Roozendaal announced that he will step down as chairman and CEO of Blender effective January 1, 2026. He was behind the creation of the free 3D graphics software that is well-known in the gaming and film industries.
According to 80 Level, Blender COO Francesco Siddi will become the new CEO, and the Blender Foundation board will also include Sergey Sharybin (Head of Development), Dalai Felinto (Head of Product), and Fiona Cohen (Head of Operations). Roozendal himself will move to the newly formed Blender Foundation Supervisory Board.
Siddi has been working at Blender since 2013, and “holds many roles, including animator, web developer, pipeline developer, producer, and Blender’s industry relations manager,” the statement said.
“We have been preparing for this since 2019. I am very proud to have such a wonderful, talented young team around me to help our free and open project enter the next decade,” said Roozendal.
Blender's recent financial report revealed that the organization was operating at a loss in 2024, and plans to address this issue by finding new corporate donors, encouraging more small donations through better communication, and maintaining a three-month cash reserve in case of unforeseen circumstances.
Blender originated in the mid-1990s as in-house software at NeoGeo, a Dutch animation studio that Roozendaal co-founded and for which he wrote custom tools. Although it was originally intended to be a commercial product, Roozendaal decided to move to an open source model.
Through a crowdfunding campaign, he raised the €110,000 needed to buy back the code base, and on October 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the GPL license.
Before the first version was released, Ton Roozendaal founded the non-profit Blender Foundation, so development was conducted through an organization similar to a commercial software developer. The software was tested in conditions close to real production on a series of "open films", starting with Elephants Dream in 2006 and continuing to the present.
This provided Blender with publicity and revealed Roozendaal's talents as a producer and promoter. By the mid-2010s, Blender was quietly being implemented at major studios, with Pixar confirming that it was one of the few third-party 3D tools it had approved for internal use.
An important milestone in the company's history was the release of Blender 2.80, a 2019 update that fixed many interface and workflow issues that had previously put off artists accustomed to commercial 3D programs.
This has been a driver of support for Blender among major tech companies, with a historic $1.2 million grant from Epic Games. AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm have since joined the funding. Last year, corporate benefactors of the Blender Foundation provided nearly 40% of the Blender Foundation’s total revenue.
The $3.1 million euros received went to pay salaries to more than 15 full-time developers, as well as a similar number of technical support staff and part-time developers.
